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Papunya locals embrace the internet

MARK COLVIN: Papunya in the Central Australian desert was the site of the great flowering of aboriginal painting in the '70s, but recently it's been sadly better known for its petrol sniffing problems.

Now though, the sale of fuel that doesn't give sniffers a high has helped almost to eradicate that problem. And now a small computer room is drawing in some of the people who missed out on formal education, and giving Papunya a glimpse of the wider world.

Katrina Bolton prepared this report.

(Reggae music)

KATRINA BOLTON: By a rocky orange mountain range, in a room filled with bright pictures and family photos, people in Papunya are making music.

(music)

KATRINA BOLTON: Volunteer Tim Brown helps out as people who have very little or no computer experience, learn how to make music, email, or set up internet banking.

TIM BROWN: They remix songs by local artists and they make songs for themselves, they use the keyboards like a musical keyboard and record their vocals on to it.

KATRINA BOLTON: Blair McFarland is a long-time youth worker who helped set up the computer room. He says community members were struggling to find a way to reconnect with the generation that missed out on school during the petrol sniffing years.

BLAIR MCFARLAND: The school principal gave evidence to the Senate saying that there was a whole generation of kids who'd been sniffing instead of going to school in their primary school years and that there wasn't any adult education systems that could possibly address their position in terms of education.

KATRINA BOLTON: And he says it is working - giving people with limited literacy and little computer experience a safe place and an opportunity to learn new skills at their own pace.

Caleb Campbell is the computer room's one official employee.

CALEB CAMPBELL: I hope it will be kept going because it's a great place to hang out and that.

KATRINA BOLTON: He's pleased to have a job in a place where many people rely on welfare.

CALEB CAMPBELL: Having a job is good because out there in the community there's nothing, nothing to do out there.

KATRINA BOLTON: It's nearly 250 kilometres from Papunya to the nearest town of Alice Springs, along what in parts what can be a rough dirt road. But volunteer Tim Brown says the people are using computer programs to explore the world in a different way.

BLAIR MCFARLAND: A lot of people know the land out here really well from an on-foot perspective but looking at it from Google maps is really big so they follow the roads out to the places they know but also looking at the Himalayas, Africa, looking at New York from a bird's-eye view.

KATRINA BOLTON: The computer room co-founder Blair McFarland says while music is the thing that draws in most young people, Papunya's older residents have been busy recording their families' history.

BLAIR MCFARLAND: Little old ladies turn up with handbags with a hundred crinkly photos in them and then they scan them all and fix them up a bit with Photoshop and put them onto the database.

KATRINA BOLTON: Ultimately, Blair McFarland wants to set up a proper archive so the community's history could be made safe, and shared between families across the region.

But the computer room has an uncertain future. Blair McFarland says it's getting by on the goodwill of volunteers and on occasional corporate donations.

BLAIR MCFARLAND: There doesn't seem to be any money for this sort of initiative, which is a really community-based initiative. Somebody in Canberra didn't decide that this would be a good idea and so consequently there is not readily accessible bucket of money that supports it.

KATRINA BOLTON: Papunya is one 20 remote Indigenous communities the Territory Government is trying to turn into fully-fledged towns. But even after the national broadband network is complete, the official maps indicate Papunya will still rely on internet delivered by satellite.

The youth worker Blair McFarland says the Territory Government has provided a dish, and agreed to pay the internet fees for one year. After that he's not sure, but for now Papunya's computer room is packed and nobody can stop the music.